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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Frae Wilson, and today is part two of our

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Speaker 1: now traditional year end, although this is happening on the

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Speaker 1: beginning of a new year. Yeah, uh, you're and look

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Speaker 1: back at what has been unearthed in the world of

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Speaker 1: history and history knowledge in the in the last twelve

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Speaker 1: months or so. We mentioned previously that some of the

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Speaker 1: biggest farms this year have already had their whole own

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Speaker 1: entire episodes of the show back in the archive. So

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Speaker 1: today we're going to look at some of the other

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Speaker 1: lesser known things. We've grouped them together into themes. Themes

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Speaker 1: seems to emerge. Yeah, anytime we're doing podcast research, kind

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Speaker 1: of the groupings will reveal themselves a little bit. There

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Speaker 1: are some trends here, So we we have these groups

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Speaker 1: together into like themes. We also have some exhimations this

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Speaker 1: year which are perennial favorites. Um and at the end

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Speaker 1: of this episode, we've got some pretty extreme science responsible

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Speaker 1: for unearthing some pretty cool stuff. So yes, let's start

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Speaker 1: off with the maybe I don't want to say the

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Speaker 1: opposite of science because that's not true. But things that

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Speaker 1: nature unearthed for us, And I love this first one

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Speaker 1: so much so. Uh, in Germany, a badger unearthed. I

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Speaker 1: just I love that Germany of badger unearthed for us

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Speaker 1: a twelfth century burial ground. The badger found a sword,

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Speaker 1: bronze bowls, and ornate belt buckle, and skeletal remains. And

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Speaker 1: all of this happened in Stolpe in Brandenburg. It helps

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Speaker 1: that two people who lived on the farm are also

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Speaker 1: amateur archaeologists innew a human pelvic bone when they saw it,

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Speaker 1: So it's not as though the badger went waving it

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Speaker 1: around and saying, hey, you guys, I found this stuff.

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Speaker 1: The people recognized that they were They did not mistake

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Speaker 1: it for maybe an animal or one of the bodies

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Speaker 1: has been determined to be that of a warrior with

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Speaker 1: several healed injuries that looked like battle wounds. It's estimated

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Speaker 1: that he probably died at around age forty. And Uh.

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Speaker 1: This was found last autumn, so inelve but it wasn't

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Speaker 1: announced until August. So thank you badger for that great fine. Yes,

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Speaker 1: I love everything about that story. Now we're gonna thank

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Speaker 1: some dolphins, some dolphins working for the U. S. Navy

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Speaker 1: found a late nineteenth century Howld torpedo off the coast

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Speaker 1: of Coronado. So it doesn't really sound all that exciting

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Speaker 1: that a torpedo was found in the ocean, except that

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Speaker 1: only fifty of these torpedoes were ever made before they

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Speaker 1: were supplanted by other technologically superior torpedoes, and this is

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Speaker 1: only the second surviving one known to still exist. So

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Speaker 1: significant fine on the part of those dolphins who were

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Speaker 1: working for the navy. Uh, this one not so much

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Speaker 1: an animal helping us. Uh. In Norway, some melting snow

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Speaker 1: in the wake of global warming has actually unearthed a

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Speaker 1: number of artifacts that prior to that had been frozen.

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Speaker 1: They had been trapped in frozen ground. And this included

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Speaker 1: a bow and arrow that we're used to hunt reindeer

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Speaker 1: that are estimated to be about thirty hundred years old. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And again, this melting actually happened in eleven, but the

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Speaker 1: announcement was made. Yeah, there are lots and lots and

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Speaker 1: lots of artifacts that are being sort of brought up

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Speaker 1: to the surface as glaciers recede and snow's melt and

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Speaker 1: things like that. As the temperature of the Earth rises,

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Speaker 1: so Uh, it's cool that we're getting Yeah, it's it's

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Speaker 1: it's unfortunate that that what's bringing a lot of this

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Speaker 1: up is is the the loss of otherwise frozen animal

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Speaker 1: have dad in climate. In addition to animals who have

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Speaker 1: healthily discovered things by accident, sometimes on purpose and sometimes

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Speaker 1: by accident, a number of amateurs found cool stuff this year.

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Speaker 1: People stumble across things in their day to day doings, yes,

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Speaker 1: sometimes in their hobbies. This first, uh, this first unearthing.

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Speaker 1: Metal detector enthusiasts in Leicestershire, England found a seventeen hundred

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Speaker 1: year old coffin containing a child's body in October, and

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Speaker 1: it was about four ft underground, but because it was

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Speaker 1: made of lead, they found it very easily with their

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Speaker 1: metal detectors. So, but there's sort of an ongoing uh,

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Speaker 1: combativeness sometimes between like academic archaeologists and anthropologists and metal

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Speaker 1: detector enthusiasts with sort of ongoing questions of is this

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Speaker 1: a help or a hindrance In this case, what the

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Speaker 1: what the metal detector folks did was they immediately contacted

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Speaker 1: professional archaeologists as soon as they realized that they had

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Speaker 1: a potentially important find in front of them and then

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Speaker 1: they organized a volunteer guard so that it would remain

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Speaker 1: undisturbed until the pros got there. Perfect. This is sort

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Speaker 1: of the ideal situation of what when people who want

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Speaker 1: to get out with their metal detectors um uncover something

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Speaker 1: that maybe have importance. Also in October, a high school

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Speaker 1: student unearthed a baby duckbill dinosaur which would be known

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Speaker 1: as paras rolfus uh this fossil and he was on

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Speaker 1: a school sponsored fossil hunting trips so success at Utah's

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Speaker 1: Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and he basically turned over

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Speaker 1: a stone and there it was so an easier fine

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Speaker 1: than many other people have had. It took hours of

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Speaker 1: work to excavate it from the rock, and the baby

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Speaker 1: was more than six ft long, so quite large. Yes,

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Speaker 1: I I had originally characterized it in my notes as tiny,

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Speaker 1: but it is only tiny compared to an adult. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it is not tiny compared to actual small things. So

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Speaker 1: in shajan Pur, India, a farmer named Naraj Kumar found

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Speaker 1: fifteen ancient arrows and hunting tools while plowing one of

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Speaker 1: his fields. And this fine came after his plow got

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Speaker 1: stuck and the animals that were pulling it couldn't move

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Speaker 1: it any farther. He found arrows and a number of

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Speaker 1: metal hunting tools. He's actually made their way kind of

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Speaker 1: out into the community before people realized that they were

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Speaker 1: potentially important, and then they were gathered back up again

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Speaker 1: uh and and handed over to authorities afterward. Our next

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Speaker 1: one involves an amateur who's a very very young one

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Speaker 1: uh So cone Ergel, who was only aged seven, found

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Speaker 1: a twenty ft long dugout canoe while taking a scuba

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Speaker 1: lesson near Oclawaha, Florida, and it's planned to be displayed

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Speaker 1: at the Marion County Museum of History and Archaeology. But

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Speaker 1: as of now, we haven't found out a lot of

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Speaker 1: detail about how old the canoe is or which tribe

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Speaker 1: may have made it. And it actually may take up

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Speaker 1: to two years for to dry out uh in a

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Speaker 1: way that won't harm it. Yeah, they have to very

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Speaker 1: very very slowly get the because it's been you know,

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Speaker 1: underwater and waterlogged for a really long time. You have

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Speaker 1: to extremely slowly get the water out to try to

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Speaker 1: do it without damaging it, without causing it to crack

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Speaker 1: or anything like that. So we may not know much

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Speaker 1: about that for a little while. Yes, this exciting, Yes,

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Speaker 1: and then he'll be you know, nine or ten. Well,

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Speaker 1: speaking of ten year olds, in May, ten year old

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Speaker 1: Jack Sinclair dug up a cannon ball from a four

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Speaker 1: board cannon in his home garden in South England. And

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Speaker 1: it turns out that this cannonball dates to the English

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Speaker 1: Civil War. And I love this quote from him. He said,

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Speaker 1: I thought it was a stone or a ball of

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Speaker 1: some kind. It was really dirty, but when we got

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Speaker 1: the dirt and mud off, it was a cannonball. I

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Speaker 1: was like wow, because I had no idea. Jack Sinclair,

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Speaker 1: aged ten, is charming. Another ten year old found a

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Speaker 1: mummy in his grandmother's attict in August. As you can imagine,

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Speaker 1: this caused all inner of excitement, but it was determined

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Speaker 1: to be a fake by the time September rolled around.

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Speaker 1: It had a real skull, but the bones were all plastic. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And the skull looks like it had been a cadaverish

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Speaker 1: skull that was prepared for medical use or research. Yes,

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Speaker 1: it was not like a dug up human remain skull.

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Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't like his grandmother had a creepy

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Speaker 1: situation going on in the attic. She had probably acquired

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Speaker 1: it through some yeah fairly boring means well, and then

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Speaker 1: it dates back to a time when when sort of

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Speaker 1: egypt stuff was extremely popular for people to own. That's

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Speaker 1: one that. Uh. The The initial story of the ten

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Speaker 1: year old finding mummy and grandma's attic made the rounds

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Speaker 1: on social and lots and lots of people were saying, hey,

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Speaker 1: have y'all seen this? Have y'all seen this? And we did,

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Speaker 1: and sadly, I mean, it is not a real mummy

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Speaker 1: of historical importance. Uh. Next up, we have several discovered graves,

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Speaker 1: mass graves and otherwise, starting with in September, archaeologists announced

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Speaker 1: that they had unearthed a completely sealed tomb in Italy

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Speaker 1: and the Etruscan necropolis of Tarkinia, and this contained a

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Speaker 1: prince holding a spear and the charred skeleton of his wife,

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Speaker 1: which had some jewelry in a box, a bronze plated

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Speaker 1: box nearby. The thing is this is actually the opposite

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Speaker 1: of what was really going on. The body holding the

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Speaker 1: spear was female and the charge skeleton next to it

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Speaker 1: was male, which led to lots and lots of discussion

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Speaker 1: about gender assumptions in the world of archaeology. All of

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Speaker 1: this was about twenty six hundred years old, and the

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Speaker 1: determination of which sex belonged to which body came after

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Speaker 1: bone analysis. Uh. It's sort of tangentially related. Italy's art

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Speaker 1: theft police also announced that they had recovered a troupe

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Speaker 1: of second and third century BC a trust Etruscan artifacts

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Speaker 1: in June of this year, so it was kind of

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Speaker 1: a big year for Etruscan stuff. Researchers at the University

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Speaker 1: of Bond discovered a fourteen hundred year old mass grave

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Speaker 1: in Mexico, and this provides evidence that the Maya actually

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Speaker 1: dismembered their captives. So the team found the skeletons of

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Speaker 1: twenty four people in what was an artificial cave, and

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Speaker 1: the skulls were all separated from the bodies, with the

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Speaker 1: lower jaws also separated from the rest of the head. Uh.

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Speaker 1: They're still very little known about who these people were,

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Speaker 1: or their social status or why they may have been killed,

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Speaker 1: but some of them had jade tooth inserts, which suggests

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Speaker 1: that they were nobles. It's a big mystery. Yeah. Uh.

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Speaker 1: This year, archaeologists in Poland reported finding four skeletons from

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Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, while excavating for a new road. And

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Speaker 1: the interesting part here was that they appear to have

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Speaker 1: undergone an anti vampire ritual before being buried. Their heads

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Speaker 1: were all removed and placed between their legs. This is

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Speaker 1: another example of ones. We got one. We got lots

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Speaker 1: and lots of emails about when it happened. Uh, we

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Speaker 1: just could not find enough primary source information to make

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Speaker 1: a whole episode about it. Yeah, it was the description

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Speaker 1: as of the situation, We're pretty brief. We kind of

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Speaker 1: gave you everything we know just now. In October, a

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Speaker 1: team that was working in a suburb of Lima, Peru

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Speaker 1: found an undisturbed wary tomb that contained two mummified corpses

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Speaker 1: and the bodies were those of an adult in an infant,

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Speaker 1: with more details to come once those bodies are unwrapped.

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Speaker 1: The theory though, is that the adult was a master

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Speaker 1: weaver and the child was killed and buried in the tomb.

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Speaker 1: The coolest bit of this finding the bodies are at

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Speaker 1: least a thousand years old, and the find is intact,

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Speaker 1: even though the dig site is right in a residential neighborhood.

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Speaker 1: So this thousand year old, perfectly preserved thing was happening

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Speaker 1: just down the street from people's houses. So these people

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Speaker 1: are from the Wary civilization, which was around for about

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Speaker 1: five years before the Inca Empire emerged. So before we

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Speaker 1: move on to a frequently requested thing of exhumations, let's

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Speaker 1: take a moment and have a word from our sponsor.

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Speaker 1: That sounds delightful. Now we will get back to a

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Speaker 1: frequent subject of listener request, and that is exhumations. So

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Speaker 1: this year, Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in April

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Speaker 1: in an attempt to discover whether he was poisoned. His

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three death certificate lists his cause of death

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Speaker 1: as prostate cancer. Naruta was a member of the Communist Party,

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Speaker 1: and his death came not long after a military coup

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Speaker 1: brought General Augusto Pinochet into power. Naruta had criticized both

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Speaker 1: the coup and Pinochet, and he had planned to go

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Speaker 1: into exile the day after he died. So naturally, this

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Speaker 1: led to lots and lots of questions about whether his

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Speaker 1: death was from natural causes. It was also further compounded

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Speaker 1: because he had told his driver that an unknown doctor

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Speaker 1: had given him an injection that had made his condition worse.

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Speaker 1: So six months after this exhamation. So this November, Patricio Bustos,

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Speaker 1: it seems unlikely at this point that Pablo Naruta was poisoned. Also,

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Speaker 1: in the realm of discovering whether or not someone had

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Speaker 1: been poisoned, Brazilian President Joel Gular was exhumed to determine

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Speaker 1: whether he had been poisoned or died of a heart

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Speaker 1: attack as was officially reported he had died in ninety six.

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Speaker 1: Uh and the tests are ongoing on that one. We

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Speaker 1: don't have the results yet. Our last exhumation today is yes,

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Speaker 1: they're ara fat. If you do not recall, he was

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Speaker 1: the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO,

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Speaker 1: and he was exhumed by French authorities last year to

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Speaker 1: confirm whether his two thousand and four death was the

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Speaker 1: substance polonium to ten. The levels of the substance in

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Speaker 1: that he was very it in. So, according to the

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Speaker 1: Swiss report that came out at that point, the results

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Speaker 1: quote moderately support the proposition that the death was the

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Speaker 1: consequence of poisoning with polonium to tent But then on

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Speaker 1: this elevated level was really from naturally occurring rate on

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Speaker 1: gas where Arafat was buried, and that he was not

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Speaker 1: actually poisoned. The Swiss team came back at this point

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Speaker 1: actually measured the rate on levels in the tomb before

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Speaker 1: they opened it, and they had ruled out rate on

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Speaker 1: as a cause of the elevated levels. It's entirely possible

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Speaker 1: that this story will continue to develop and that by

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Speaker 1: have happened. This is the second time we have actually

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Speaker 1: that story is continuing to evolve. And now we're moving

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Speaker 1: on to I mean, I already think like digging people

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Speaker 1: up to determine if they were poisoned. It's pretty extreme,

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Speaker 1: but this is extreme science, super extreme science. Uh. In June,

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Speaker 1: researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the Croatian Natural

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Speaker 1: History Museum published a paper in Plos One detatling their

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Speaker 1: discovery of the world's oldest evidence of a bone tumor.

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Speaker 1: It came from the left rib of a Neanderthal who

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Speaker 1: lived about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, and

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Speaker 1: this tumor probably came from a disease called fibrous dysplasia,

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Speaker 1: and before this point, the earliest bone tumors that we

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Speaker 1: The bone came from an excavation site which contained the

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Speaker 1: bones of at least eight hundred and seventy six Neanderthals,

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Speaker 1: and it has has not been matched with any of

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Speaker 1: the other bones or fragments there. So it's possible that

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Speaker 1: the remains from the site were the victims of cannibalism

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Speaker 1: or pre natural predation by carnivorous animals. So we don't know,

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Speaker 1: but this tumor is so much older than anything we

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Speaker 1: have ever seen or studied before, and to have had

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Speaker 1: to be looking through the bones of eight seventy different

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Speaker 1: Neanderthals and before finding it, I think that one has

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Speaker 1: a tumor. Yeah. Well, And one of the things about

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Speaker 1: this particular find is that a lot of times this

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Speaker 1: disease causes tumors like they're not it's not a malignancy,

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Speaker 1: but a lot of times it does cause tumors elsewhere

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Speaker 1: in the body. And unless they find other bones belonging

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Speaker 1: to the same body, they won't be able to sort

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Speaker 1: So cool, but also it almost leaves more questions answer

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Speaker 1: raising more questions. In October, a lot of our findings

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Speaker 1: researchers published a paper in Science that examines d n

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Speaker 1: A from three hundred and sixty four prehistoric skeletons, and

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Speaker 1: these skeletons spanned four thousand years of early human history.

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Speaker 1: What they were looking at was tiny changes in mitochondrial

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Speaker 1: DNA from humans who lived between seventy and thirty years ago.

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Speaker 1: So what they found was that there were huge waves

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Speaker 1: of prehistoric UH migration among early humans. Previously, the accepted

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Speaker 1: Near East into the rest of Europe. But these findings

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Speaker 1: suggest that there were actually really big migrations from western

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Speaker 1: one unidirectional spreading of people, that there was a lot

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Speaker 1: more movement going on between early human groups. UH. The

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Speaker 1: next one involves airborne leisure technology. So using this UH,

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Speaker 1: archaeologists found the Cambodian city of Maundra Pravada. They've known

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Speaker 1: this city existed before, but they could never pinpoint exactly

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Speaker 1: where because the city's location was unknown until this year

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Speaker 1: to the scientific community. Researchers were hoping as of the

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Speaker 1: announcement that they located it, that it had not been looted.

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Speaker 1: They were just kind of praying that there was nothing

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Speaker 1: going on there and that they would actually have this

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Speaker 1: bounty of research to be conducted, and that research is

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Speaker 1: going to go on for quite sometimes. So they have

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Speaker 1: located it and the work is sort of just beginning. Now.

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Speaker 1: We have a robot, a robot called flac to TC

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Speaker 1: used an infrared camera and a laser scanner to help

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Speaker 1: archaeologists explore the temple of the Feathered Serpent near Mexico

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Speaker 1: City this year. The team wound up finding these strange

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Speaker 1: yellow spears and they don't currently know what they are

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Speaker 1: about or what they mean. These speares are a yellow

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Speaker 1: clay that's covered with jarow site and they had to

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Speaker 1: use the robot to explore because there's just three ft

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Speaker 1: long tunnel running under the temple that was full of debris,

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Speaker 1: So a robot helped with that particular unearthing. So cool. Uh,

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Speaker 1: this one's interesting. An airport security full body scanner, which

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Speaker 1: are a little bit controversial still for some people, revealed

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Speaker 1: that an authentic Roman fresco is under a newer nineteenth

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Speaker 1: century edition which is in the louver. So they used

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Speaker 1: that same technology to examine art instead of people and

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Speaker 1: found whole magical thing. The way that this whole discovery

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Speaker 1: was building, some of the headlines was sort of like, uh,

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Speaker 1: actual Roman art found under fake nineteenth century art, And

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Speaker 1: I was like, that's a little harsh on the nineteenth

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Speaker 1: century art that we're talking about, but yeah, they were

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Speaker 1: able to prove that definitively that there is and much

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Speaker 1: older piece underneath this newer piece. That's so cool. That

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Speaker 1: reminds me of I don't know, if you ever read

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Speaker 1: the t s A blog, I highly recommend it to anybody. Um,

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Speaker 1: it's also a little disturbing because you find out how

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Speaker 1: many people are getting on airplanes, are trying to get

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Speaker 1: on airplanes and loaded weapons. But they often will be

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Speaker 1: like we found seventeen cannonballs this week from the Civil War.

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Speaker 1: We found they often find these little odd artifacts of

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Speaker 1: history and this kind of makes me think of it.

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Speaker 1: They used similar technology to find art under art. So

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Speaker 1: so that concludes our retrospective this year. Well, a lot

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Speaker 1: of what all has been unearthed. I'm sure that there

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Speaker 1: are many many other things. Oh yeah, that that we

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Speaker 1: could have talked about. I was I was telling Holly

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Speaker 1: this morning that when I sat down to actually wrangle

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Speaker 1: all of my collected stuff into notes for this episode,

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Speaker 1: normally what I do is I open all of my

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Speaker 1: stuff in tabs and and I like scrolled and scrolled

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Speaker 1: and scrolled down the bookmarks until I got to the bottom.

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Speaker 1: And then Firefox said, you were about to open nine tabs.

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Speaker 1: Are you sure you want to do that? So even

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Speaker 1: with yeah, we did not with exclusions, Yes, we did

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Speaker 1: not talk about all ninety nine things. And I'm sure

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Speaker 1: there are many other things besides those nine. So you

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Speaker 1: were welcome to right in if there are something that

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Speaker 1: you would like us to either have a whole episode

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Speaker 1: on or mentioned at some point in the future. And

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Speaker 1: listener mail, and I again, do you want to thank

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Speaker 1: the History Blog, which is where I getting up of

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Speaker 1: a lot of these stories first. Well, in a lot

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Speaker 1: of times, news sites will eventually pick up a history

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Speaker 1: story kind of almost the same way they would a

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Speaker 1: human interest story. They're like, this is a neat thing

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Speaker 1: that happened, whereas history the History blog is focused on

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Speaker 1: the historical events that are coming up. Yes, so they

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Speaker 1: kind of aggregate them more quickly. Well, and also a

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Speaker 1: lot of times there's much better context and more important

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Speaker 1: context than what's going around with the headline. So cool resources.

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Speaker 1: You do not already read that? Um, I have some

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Speaker 1: listener mail before we sign off from this today. I

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Speaker 1: hope you will read it. I will do that. Uh,

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Speaker 1: this is from Brian, and Brian says, I enjoyed your

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Speaker 1: podcast on smallpox. I'd like to clear up a small detail.

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Speaker 1: You acted surprised that the cows then are used had horns.

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Speaker 1: In fact, all cows and bulls have horns. Some beef

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Speaker 1: breeds don't have horns because of selective breeding. Very cows

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Speaker 1: typically don't have horns, but this is because they are

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Speaker 1: removed when they are calves for the safety of other

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Speaker 1: cows and people that were with them. When we'd be

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Speaker 1: hord cows on our dairy farm. We administer sedatives and

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Speaker 1: pay medication to reduce the trauma. I just wanted to

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Speaker 1: set a little light on a part of your podcast

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Speaker 1: that I knew something about. Thank you for producing an

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Speaker 1: enjoyable show. So thank you, Brian. Yeah, that's cool information.

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Speaker 1: It is cool, and I think I am. I am

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Speaker 1: more familiar with the with beef cow breads that have

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Speaker 1: been bred not to have farns, just because they were

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Speaker 1: more prevalent where I grew up, So it was surprising

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Speaker 1: to me to see a cow skin still had horns

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Speaker 1: on it. So thank you so much Brian for writing

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Speaker 1: in with that clarification. If you would like to write

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Speaker 1: to us about this or any other episode, you can.

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Speaker 1: We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're

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Speaker 1: also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History class

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Speaker 1: Stuff and on Twitter at Miston History. Are tumbler is

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Speaker 1: at Miston History dot tumbler dot com. And we are

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Speaker 1: on Pinterest. If you would like to learn more about

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Speaker 1: what we've talked about today, come to our website. Put

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Speaker 1: the word archaeology in the search bar, and you will

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Speaker 1: find an article called what's the biggest archaeological find in History.

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Speaker 1: You can do all that and a whole lot more

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Speaker 1: at our website, which is how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: for more onness and thousands of other topics. Is it

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. M